Thursday, October 04, 2007 Rant Archive
Mark your calendars for next Tuesday, Oct. 9, at 8:30 p.m. on the east coast.
That’s when there will be a major premiere of THE GOLDEN COMPASS at the Rockefeller Ice Skating Rink in Manhattan. It will be held to coincide with the rink’s opening for the season and if that’s not enough – oh, be still my heart -- there also are special events planned in Italy, Germany, and Holland, as well, on the very same day.
THE GOLDEN COMPASS is a fantasy about a parallel universe where human souls take on the form of animal companions and only a 12-year-old girl can save the world. The film stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Sam Elliott and the voices if Ian McKellen and Ian McShane. It is expected to be the Big Film of the Holiday season, and it is being compared to the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, which came from the same movie company, New Line.
One might think what’s the big deal? It’s a movie premiere? But it’s much more than that naïve one. Or, more accurately, it’s much less. It’s not actually the premiere of the film. It’s the premiere of a new trailer. The film itself doesn’t actually open in the United States until December.
This is it, the decision we have been waiting for all season long. Tonight we found out who won the third season of TOP CHEF. Because they decided to send three contestants to the finale this season, it was even more of a nail biter than usual. And really, the level of talent was so high that it really could have come to down to any of them. In an episode that blended a live action reunion show with clips from the final challenge, tonight’s installment was both nostalgic and nail bitingly exciting.
The final three contestants were sent high up in the mountains of Aspen, and given a sumptuous display of food to choose from for their final meal. But there was much more excitement to come, because they still had to draw knives to see who would be helping them in the kitchen. Normally contestants from the past come back to haunt the finalists, much like the ghosts came to visit Ebenezer Scrooge. But this season was different, because these finalists got the pick of the litter in the food world. Hung picked Rocco Dispirito, Casey got Michelle Bernstein and Dale had Todd English. As great as it was to get this amazing help, it had to be a little daunting ordering these professionals around. But in the spirit of teamwork, these famous chefs checked their egos at the door and set about to help these fledgling chefs make the best meal possible.
The makeover episode must be the highest rated of the season for ANTM, besides the finale. Otherwise, why would the producers delay it until two contestants have gone??? The public wants their makeover humiliations!! Now!! Instead this week we get a real filler of an episode.
Firstly challenges for the sake of being challenging really bore me. Tonight’s lessons with Miss J were beyond pointless. The girls had to practice walking in straight jackets. The intent of this ridiculousness was to get them to use their legs better, but I think Tyra just wanted to put together a creepy haunted mental institution. Boring. But it did end up serving a modicum of a purpose, besides filling 7 of the 44 minutes of the show. The girls had to walk in a “couture” fashion show as their challenge.
I am always amused at the judges insistence that someone is “not high fashion enough.” Like any of these girls is going to be on a real runway in Paris or Milan anytime soon. Firstly, most of them are already too old. There are very few new twenty-two year old models. Natalia Vodianova is considered an elder statesman at the ripe age of 25. But no matter. It’s still entertaining to watch Tyra and co., sitting in their LA perches far from the strum und drang of real fashion, decide who’s high fashion and who’s merely hootchie.
Chef Gordon Ramsey continues his quest to help bring even the worst run restaurants back to life by visiting The Mixing Bowl Eatery in Bellmore, N.Y., in tonight’s episode of KITCHEN NIGHTMARES. As usual, there is a serious problem with this establishment’s management. And I have to tell you, that appears to be a consistent theme to every episode I’ve seen so far. I guess it makes sense. I mean restaurants are serious business, so if you have somebody running things that doesn’t understand the ins and outs of even the most basic principles of business, you are screwed. The Mixing Bowl’s idea of good business is giving out an abundance of coupons. You would think that is a smart thing to do, but if everybody coming in is eating for free – or close to it – you aren’t going to make a profit, even if you pack the place every night. The bottom line is – at least from what I can see – that poor hygiene and substandard cooking can be easily fixed. It is almost always more difficult to deal with the human aspect of this show than the rest. But Ramsey knows what he’s doing and he keeps proving that week after week.
The Mixing Bowel is another family owned and operated restaurant. The owner is the head chef, his wife and sister work there and the bulk of his family is dependent on the business coming back to life. It’s always sad to watch these people break their backs just trying to break even. With loses in the thousands, closing down this restaurant could destroy this family. Without Gordon’s help, there may be no coming back from this disaster. So while the show is good entertainment for us, it is a matter of utmost importance to these people. This is why I say Chef Ramsay is really a softie inside, because he truly does care about helping these people get back to being profitable. But manager Mike isn’t helping to make this happen.
After putting in all that effort and playing nice with the younger kids, Greg failed to win the gold star, in last week’s episode of KID NATION. This week, we see his displeasure at being passed over so callously. He doesn’t seem to understand that even the 8-year-olds can see right through him. I mean you don’t go from being the town bully to being everything for everyone without people noticing. Besides, Michael has proven himself to be such a standup little guy that it would have been a serious miscarriage of justice not to bestow the $20,000 prize on him. But those petty disagreements had to be put on hold – at least for now – because Bonanza City has been hit with a nasty dust storm. But that storm is nothing compared to the one that is brewing over some unpopular decisions being made by the town-council members.
With all the stress of starting up a new society, leaving their parents and killing a chicken, the kids needed to blow off a little steam. What’s better than a mug of root beer, candy and good friends to unwind? But there is nothing worse than being woken up by a 15-year-old with an attitude, after a night of partying. Greg is really bitter about losing that gold star, and he’s making sure everybody feels his pain. Smashing pots and pans over the other kid’s heads was brutal and mean, but proved that these children still need a curfew. And somebody needs to give Greg a good talking to. Seriously, a 15-year-old should know better than to intimidate, physically threaten and verbally abuse smaller kids. You just know this kid is the bully on the playground back home. The one good thing is the fact that there is a mix of children with different backgrounds and ages, so when one becomes a problem another one can step in and smooth over the situation.
So, I’m sitting there watching the second episode of BIONIC WOMAN, and less than five minutes into the show, I’ve already seen the funeral of Will Anthros (Chris Bowers), a grieving Jamie Sommers (Michelle Ryan) discover a huge file on her in Will’s apartment, and Jaime start to engage in rough anonymous sex in a public restroom. The first thing I thought of when Jaime and Steve (yeah, that’s his name) started going at it was Larry Niven’s famous essay on Kryptonian-human sexual issues, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex,” and sure enough, Steve gets a rib broken in less than a minute. I bet Niven’s still laughing.
Anyway, the private group behind the bionic project, personified by Jonas Bledsoe (Miguel Ferrer), is pushing Jamie to sign up for deep blue hero stuff, but Jamie’s not having any of it. Seeing your boyfriend fatally shot in front of you might make one less than amenable to such projects, especially when the shooter was the first bionic woman (Katee Sackhoff). But, after saving a woman from suicide, Jamie reconsiders and decides to put her awesomeness to good use. To that end, she gets introduced to her new supervisor Antonio (Isaiah Washington), a guy she already met in a bookstore. This ongoing surveillance and deep checking into her life doesn’t tickle her fancy in the slightest, but come on. Here’s a hypothetical: Beat people up with your bionic appendages or tend bar? Please, like that’s even a choice.
Woody Allen once said that he’d never write and direct a mystery. Mysteries, he contended, were too light and fluffy for someone who saw himself as latter-day Bergman. But that was of course he came out with MANHATTAN MUREDER MYSTERY.
What changed? I think over the course of time the public’s perception of mysteries changed. People realized that what was once genre fiction – put into the same category as, say, romance novels – could in the right hands become literary. I believe the person most single-handedly responsible for that shift attitude was P.D. James, who almost single-handedly raised mystery writing to an art form.
That was followed on television by PRIME SUSPECT, the British series that helped restore television’s image as an art form. Now, also from England, comes HBO’s FIVE DAYS, about a woman who disappears mysteriously followed by the disappearance of her children. As the series title suggests, the five-part series covers five days in the investigation, which actually takes place over an almost two-month period. (The action unfolds on day one, three, 28, 33 and the 79th day of the investigation.)
This week’s episode found Alex (Jimmy Smits) dealing with both the perks and pitfalls of his new appointment as CEO of the Duque sugar and rum empire. On the business side of things, Alex met with an influential congressman to pitch his business plan for turning a profit by cultivating ethanol, the fuel of the future, from sugar cane. Alex’s hope is to secure government subsidies, which would halve the cost of initial ethanol production—an important factor, since the money needed for the venture would come at considerable cost to the Duque family.
On the seedy side of things, Manuel, (one of the thugs Alex hired to eliminate a rival’s enforcer in the pilot episode,) gets the brilliant idea to blackmail Alex about the murder. Alex refuses, and soon after his pregnant wife is stung by a gift-boxed scorpion. Alex loses it and beats Manuel down, threatening his life. Instead of relenting Manuel approaches the Samuels family (Alex’s rivals) and offers up information about the murdered man and the location of his body. It turns out to be a ploy; the police find nothing but a dead pig at the alleged burial site. Alex and loyal thug Santo (Oscar Torres,) abduct Manuel and drive him out to the Everglades with two options: go back to Cuba, or die in the swamp. Manuel chooses exile, and Santo ensures this kind of problem goes away for good by feeding the murdered enforcer’s corpse to the swamp crocs, eliminating all evidence of the crime.
Ned has a special gift. He can bring the dead back to life. He discovers this gift, given by no one in particular, at the age of ten. He saves his dog after it’s been hit by a truck and then his mother after she suffers a brain hemorrhage. He also discovers two significant aspects of this gift. The first is that if the re-lifed live longer than a minute, death must come to someone else. In his mother’s case, saving her kills his next door neighbor- father of his first love, a girl named Chuck. The second consequence is, “First touch is life, second touch is dead forever.” If he touches them again, they die for good.
He discovers this with his mother as well when she kisses him goodnight.
At his mother’s funeral, his neighbor is being laid to rest as well in the next plot over. He sees the now-orphaned Chuck and they share a kiss, and then get sent in different directions. Ned becomes a pie maker in the big city while Chuck was sent to be raised by her Aunts Lillian and Vivian who had matching personality disorders that made them shut-ins. A detective named Emerson discovers Ned’s gift and they form a partnership to solve murders and collect rewards.
And then Chuck is murdered on cruise ship. Ned re-lifes her and keeps her alive. So begins this visually stunning, fast-paced dark comedy. This is a show that is borne of the strides cable programming has made. It pushes the bounds of good taste with a whimsical feel. The writing is smart, playing off a simple repetition motif to the off kilter philosophy of “I suppose dying is as good a reason as any to start living.”
Ah, potential is like a mind – a terrible thing to waste.
Case in point is CAVEMEN, acting as a lame-o gateway to the equally flaccid CARPOOLERS.
Cavepeople are living among us and working at regular joe jobs, just trying to “fit in” and occasionally getting it on with the hot babe “sapes.” There’s a brief mention of the peculiarly absent cavewomen, but it does provide one of the only funny lines in the show: “Keep you penis in your genus.” In this first episode, the main cavedude works for a version of Ikea (couldn’t get the rights…?), is dating a homosapien female and doesn’t want the other cavedudes to know for fear of phyla persecution. Yep. That’s all they could come up with after a months-long do-over.
CAVEMEN is based on the wildly popular characters from the Geico car insurance commercials, but sadly, that’s where the similarities end.
“My life consists of spies, car chases and computer stealing ninjas.” So says Chuck at the start of the second episode. What is he doing during this voiceover? Making sure his new trainee, undercover NSA agent John Casey, doesn’t obliterate a shoplifter. “Every moment of my life is in danger,” he goes on to tell us, because he has all the secrets of the US intelligence community locked in his brain.
The real question was whether CHUCK could sustain the high action and tight comedy of the premiere. Two car explosions, one car chase, a helicopter stunt and a hand-to-hand dust up between trained assassins covered the action; the jumpy sincerity of Zachary Levi’s Chuck took care of the comedy. Thankfully the writers have given him plenty of physical comedy bits to play with and decently crafted fish-out-of-water jokes to play off the dead pan of the spies. So far, the series is still very promising.
This week the obvious question is addressed: how will the government get back its’ secrets and will Chuck survive the process? The NSA sends their top scientist, Jonas Zarnow. Zarnow has to remotely test Chuck- keep them separated for their own safety- to confirm he has the “Intersect” program in his head. During the test we learned a flash flood of secrets ranging from the serious (“The plot to assassinate Jimmy Carter was foiled…”) to the sublime (“Oceanic Flight 815 was SHOT DOWN…”). It’s a blink of an eye joke but at least they have the sense to pack as much humor into it as possible.